This GLaDOS potato is a lie

Why settle for virtual reality when you can make the digital world into reality? [Josh] wanted to have a GLaDOS potato accompany him through life when not playing Portal 2. He set to work to see what kind of replica prop he could come up with. Judging from the image above, and demo video after the break, he nailed it right in the spud.

There’s no worrying about rot. The potato and a few parts were molded from Sculpey and baked in the oven. Since the fake spud is hollow in the center it’s easy to hide the bits that make it talk. An old MP3 player was loaded with quotes from the game, and plays them back via an LM386 audio amplifier circuit and a speaker hidden below the electronic eye. The eye is lit by five yellow LEDs which are also tied into the amplifier to make them blink and fade with the intensity of the audio signal.

A paint job and the nails and wire really make the build look just right. Now [Josh] needs to host a geek-themed Halloween party so he can really show this off.

LED won’t work with 1.2v, but you could use a DC-DC/buck converter to get you up to the 2.5v+ range and drive the LED. Seems like a Lion/LiPo would do you better at a standard 3.7v and less circuitry to worry about.

A potato only gives about 1.2V. So I guess you could, but you’d still need something to amplify the voltage. The other problem is that with a real potato battery, it would only run until the zinc all got oxidized.

I think I’m going to use her voice for my home-human interface project I’ve been hatching slowly for the last couple of years. Still only ideas unfortunately, but when I get something cool done I will show you :)

I want to see someone take all the GLaDOS speech from both Portal games, cut it up into phonemes and words then use that as sound samples for a phoneme based text to speech program so GLaDOS can say anything.

Remember the BBC’s make Dr. Who say anything website, with the voice of Tom Baker? They have him record all the various bits so site visitors could type what they’d always fantasized about having Dr Who say.

Why didn’t you hook up the 9volt brick to the fake nails an run the power threw those clip wires? That would have have been cool and that would save you the hassle of dismantling it every time you need to turn it off.

Wow, I just found this and it reminded me of the the talking Space thing from skyrim–the was created by valve. (never played Portal though) … I wonder if the space thing could be made by the author.
The electronics could be the same (and switch the sounds on the mp3 player)
However, another model would nee to be 3d-printed to look like the space probe.